The article suggests that this might be an opossum, but opossums generally don’t get mange.
And the digits on this animal are quite slender and straight, like we would expect from a raccoon. Opossums have curled digits that are quite clunky by comparison.
It is almost identical to this mangy raccoon that was captured in Oklahoma:
The chupacabra phenomenon is really bizarre, for nearly every one of these animals has turned out to be a dog, a coyote (or coyote hybrid), a fox, or a raccoon that simply has no hair.
When humans see such an animal, the imagination tends to embellish what they eyes are observing. And our ability to tell stories about what we think see means that we can take what are really mundane occurrences and make them quite fanciful.
That these animals are given such wide billing online is really the result of our alienation from the natural world. When people lived closer to nature, mangy foxes and raccoons would be known to nearly everyone, but in our post-industrial societies, most people find out about nature through television and the internet. And both of these media can create a whole new set of mythologies.
In colonial New England, it was accepted biological fact that gray foxes scouted prey for cougars, simply because gray foxes had figured out how to follow cougars as a way of getting access to deer carcasses. People knew that cougars and gray foxes were always found together, so they embellished a story about the foxes helping the cougars hunt.
Now that cougars no longer roam New England (at least officially), hairless canids and raccoons become chupacabras. I am sure that someone will leave comments on this blog telling me why this animal cannot be a raccoon. I still have people telling me that the dead raccoon that was given a Viking funeral off the coast of Long Island (“Montauk Monster”) was some kind of dog. (That’s easy to debunk. No dog has “hands.” When fully-furred, raccoons look fatter and shorter legged than they are. That’s why the legs look too long on the hairless animals.)
The real problem with these animals is people like to create fantasies and conspiracy theories about them, which take on an almost religious overtone. One cannot question the fantasy or the conspiracy theory.
The animal becomes a totem in a religion without a deity.
